Study 3: Edstrand, E. (2015). Making the invisible visible: How students make
use of carbon footprint calculator in environmental education. Learning, Media
and Technology, 41(2), 416–436, DOI:
10.1080/17439884.2015.1032976.

Digital technologies and environmental education represent two rather new
areas in school curricula. The background of the present research is an interest
at the inter-section between how students learn about environmental issues
(e.g., climate change) and the role digital technologies may play in such
contexts. Thus, the aim is to investigate tool-mediated activities in
environmental science education. The digital tools that are used in the
instruction in this research are a virtual laboratory and a carbon footprint
calculator. The study is guided by the questions of how digital tools codetermine
activities and students’ reasoning about scientific knowledge and
environmental topics, as well as what implications the use of such tools have
for the development of science literacy. Analytically, this is studied within a
sociocultural perspective on learning and by relating it to Dewey’s view of
learning through inquiry. The empirical material consists of questionnaires and
video data. The thesis consists of four studies. Study 1 builds on the analysis
of questionnaire data from a corpus of almost 500 students’ written pre- and
post-test answers to a problem-solving question in which they are required to
design an experiment before and after working with a virtual lab. The second
set of data comprises video recordings of upper secondary school students’
work with the two virtual tools. The results are presented in Studies 2 and 3.
In addition, and in relation to the interest in science literacy more generally,
Study 4 focuses on students’ work with an assignment requiring them to
evaluate research reported in two scientific article abstracts on climate change.
On a general level, the findings show that digital tools incorporate conceptual
distinctions and operations that provide “shortcuts” for the students’
reasoning by providing access points to complex knowledge about the
environment. This means that the students are able to engage in sophisticated
discussions about environmental issues linked to human-driven climate
change without requiring too much specific prior knowledge. However, the
results also point to dilemmas connected to the use of such sophisticated
tools. That is, for students to make meaning in ways that are relevant to
understanding scientific argumentation, some of the processes and conceptual
premises need to be unpacked by a competent partner (e.g., a teacher).
Through engaging in such tool-mediated activities, students develop new
cognitive habits, that is, new ways of reasoning which are made possible
through the support of the tools. Thus, in sum, the present empirical studies
demonstrate that digital tools have the potential to reconfigure learning
activities that support students’ development of science literacy in
environmental science education. At the same time, the analyses show that the
tools are abstract and far from self-instructive. They index complex forms of
knowledge that are not always transparent to the users. Thus, to reach
curricular goals, the use of such tools in environmental science instruction
presupposes guidance and support by teachers.... more